Share this story

Another one bites the dust. Microsoft has been shifting much of its software to a subscription model, and the latest Office 2019 news heralds another change on that front.

The suite of Microsoft programs had been available for purchase as one-off perpetual licenses through the company’s Home Use Program. HUP lets select businesses offer employees discounted rates on the software from their workplaces to use at home.

Both Office Professional Plus 2019 and Office Home and Business 2019 have been removed as options for one-off licenses under the program. Instead, HUP will give a 30% discount on annual subscriptions to Office software. Office 365 Personal will run HUP members $48.99 a year, and Office 365 Home will cost them $69.99 annually. The feature sets of the two subscriptions are the same, including premium versions of Microsoft programs, 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage, and OneDrive ransomware detection. The Home version supports up to six people, and Personal is for an individual.

Further Reading

For a bit of fine print, a perpetual license that you’ve purchased through HUP will continue to work. And once you buy a Microsoft subscription through HUP, you can keep the lower price even if you leave that employer.

Microsoft has been reaping the rewards of its transition to subscription-driven software. The company closed its 2019 fiscal year with a cool $11 billion in quarterly revenue for its Productivity and Business Processes division, including 31% growth in revenue for Office 365 Commercial.

For users, the subscription model can be more of a mixed bag. Subscriptions ensure that customers are always getting the latest features and support from the company. At the same time, it’s one more account to manage and maintain with monthly or annual costs.

Honestly, from a large Enterprise standpoint, the subscription model does seem like a good fit. It's just a lot easier to deal with the subscription model vs the clusterfuck that was MS Licensing. It's not the best fit for everyone (I can see this being a big line item for small-to-medium businesses) but MS licensing used to be a goddamn FTE position.

In terms of compatibility with the rest of your coworkers? Bad. Real bad.

Just another line item that's getting bigger for FY2020. Sigh.

Microsoft has been iterating steady improvements into the Office 365 suite. At $12.50 a month, the small business version is pretty hard to beat. $150 per year for a business isn't much money. I'd understand if the open source world couldn't keep up. Microsoft's been hyper focused on providing value and largely succeeding at that goal for the past few years.

So, 2019? You can still buy Office 2019 with a one-time purchase and no feature updates, or an Office 365 subscription with updates. You need to search a bit deeper for the Pro version. The cheaper versions that lack Access and Publisher are not hidden in any way, they’re either on the pricing page or one click away.

My last employer recommended LibreOffice for people who only needed to work with Visio diagrams occasionally to save on licensing costs. It did the job, but having to learn a different UI was a little annoying. File compatibility seemed fine on the docs I tried it with.

Microsoft has been iterating steady improvements into the Office 365 suite. At $12.50 a month, the small business version is pretty hard to beat. $150 per year for a business isn't much money. I'd understand if the open source world couldn't keep up. Microsoft's been hyper focused on providing value and largely succeeding at that goal for the past few years.

Overall, I've been wary of this whole software as a service movement, preferring to buy my applications, rather than renting them on a monthly basis. That said, being able to grab Office alongside a TB of cloud data for $7 a month is a deal that's hard to hate.

And in other news, the market share of free or open alternatives, like OpenOffice.Org, Libre Office, and Google Drive continues to rise.

Raising prices and forcing people into subscription models is just about the worst idea I can think of. Microsoft should be giving home users free software, to get them hooked, rather than making it harder to use Microsoft's products.

Personally, I've given up on "real" Office, and I've been using FOSS or online tools for the last 15 years at home, and I don't miss Office at home.

I do need Word for one specific task at work (editing specific templates that are viewed in Word), but aside from that one thing, I haven't fired up Word for writing in years.

As someone whose company participates in this program, I'm seeing an effective change of paying $10 once to paying $50/year? Comical. I'll just use Google's suite of applications.

Exactly. I work in IT and I always have users asking me where to get Office. I have been directing them to the $10 HUP copies of Office and Windows. I'm not even going to bother directing them to HUP for Office and just tell them to use 1 of the 5 or 10 licenses they get to activate things with their Office 365 account and just accept that they will lose access to Office when they leave their employment.

Yeah, I tried to get my hands on a copy of Office about a month ago and it was already too late. Pretty pissed about it, frankly. I don't need to spend $70/yearmonth to get a terabyte of OneDrive, especially since I wanted to install it on a Mac, where I use iCloud...

Lately I've been using more Google Docs than Libre/Open Office, and even more than Office Live. Seems more compatible with not so common Excel formulas at least, and Libre/Open Office is f-ugly even tryng every skin available

Office 365 Personal is essentially free if your primary use is for the 1TB cloud storage.

My use scenario sounds like it's the polar opposite of everybody here... I stopped using Libre/Open office once I went shopping for cloud storage and found that Microsoft's office 365's 1TB was the best bang for my buck.

It's been quite a while since I had to use Office.gdocs is fine since i don't ever need to control page layout.gsheets is better from my pov since I'd rather write extensions in javascript than vba.gslides sucks but I don't make presentations as part of my work anymore.

if someone's bought into the MS world, Office subscription would make sense. But, I'm not in that world anymore ...

I'm waiting for the day when they will start charging monthly for Windows.

It's probably coming. If they could figure out how to work it out through their OEMs I'm sure they would have started already.

I'm certain that the OEMs would not like it because right now they can advertise a PC with 'free' Windows. But I see no reason MS couldn't just decide that the OEM versions would work for one year after activation and then start dunning for rent.

I hadn't noticed any problems when viewing documents from work. I never took docs I generated in Libre Office to work so I don't know the compatibility going that way. Now that I'm retired, I don't have to worry about it. If I do need to send a document that I generated, I just export it as a PDF and send it that way.

I did notice that some of the old, old Word documents from work displayed better in Libre Office than in the newer versions of Word.

I think it would be good to note that the HUP "perpetual license" was never perpetual, it was just a one-time fee.

The license expired when you are no longer employed by the same company, when your company no longer purchased SA for Office, when you were no longer assigned a license for Office on your work computer, or when the versions mismatch.

So, by the terms of the HUP program, unless they changed them as part of this modification (and I don't see that in the July 2019 terms), once your office computer is not using Office Pro Plus 2019 covered by SA, you are no longer licensed to use the HUP version at home. And since there is no longer a HUP version of 2019, this means everyone will be forced off of their "perpetual" HUP version eventually.

So the ability to have the discounted version of Office 365 for as long as you stay a subscriber, is a new, better benefit but it does come at a steep cost.

I'm waiting for the day when they will start charging monthly for Windows.

Eh, I see them moving to the subscription model for Office, but Windows has been going in the opposite direction (for consumers, not businesses) and it basically has to. They gave the Windows 10 upgrade away for free because they know from Windows 7 and 8 that virtually no one is going to go out of their way to pay for an upgrade. And with the consumer segment moving away from PCs and towards just mobile phones and tablets where Windows has no presence... Trying to charge people a subscription fee for Windows would only accelerate that transition.

Seeing as how Office through HUP was $15 and the Office 365 Home is $70, this is a big step backwards. Seeing as how I can often buy Office 365 for ~$70, there is no benefit to users through HUP. Thanks Microsoft!

As others have noted above, LibreOffice. Yes, it's possible that some formulae and scripts from MS Office might not work as expected, but it you're trying to use those you should have Real Office anyway - you're using it for work, not occasional stuff. It's more than good enough for use at home.

For online, Google Docs is fine. On a phone, Office Mobile while limited works pretty well, and it's free.

The only time I've had a compatibility issue was, once, attempting to load a .xlsx document created with LO into Excel Mobile on my phone with limited connectivity I got a "can't open older version of Excel" message - apparently anything but the latest file format has to run through the cloud for translation, including MS Office files. Otherwise, files transfer back and forth fine.

LO (and probably OO - I don't mess with that any more) also has a capable Draw component that's way beyond MS Paint. Does multiple layers, CAD format imports, and the like. And the ability to work with ALL versions of Visio files. My main gripe is that PDF files only open into Draw and it's a pain (unless I just haven't discovered the magic decoder ring) to get the text into Writer. No biggie, because I can open PDF fully editable in ACD Canvas, and copy the reflowed text into Writer if I need to.

Yeah, I tried to get my hands on a copy of Office about a month ago and it was already too late. Pretty pissed about it, frankly. I don't need to spend $70/month to get a terabyte of OneDrive, especially since I wanted to install it on a Mac, where I use iCloud...

1. Look up academic software stores - oddly 2016 is still available for $30~ at select schools. Sign up for a class, now you're legally a student. Buy software legally as a student. Then, Students drop classes because they're too lazy, right?

2. Always those shady ebay, deals sites, etc offers.

3. Always those illegal ways to get it.

....

Otherwise, 1. Office Online - always free, fewer features, but 100% legal. Sign up for a free outlook.com (Or Microsoft) account, click on the apps menu in the top right to switch from outlook to word, etc.

2. Office for Tablet and Phone. These are free, dumbed down, but work.

3. Competitors Libre/Open Office, Google, WordPerfect, Apple's, etc.

Compatibility sucks, even simple things like formatting of text to appear on page changes between real Office and let's say Google Docs. Blame only yourself if numbers get truncated, words don't soar, etc. I've seen it all and tell them to just use Microsoft Office.

WordPerfect is still used in the legal field, and mature enough to have the kitchen sink. The rest are constant beta versions imo....

Oh, just thought of another possibility.

Look into the licensing terms of 365 academic.

I vaguely remember that you can install it as a student (sign up for any community college class), and after leaving school (ie. Not a student anymore), you were legally allowed to continue running it for another year or so.

Sign up for class, student, get 365 as a student, drop class, 365 legally good for a year+.

Raising prices and forcing people into subscription models is just about the worst idea I can think of. Microsoft should be giving home users free software, to get them hooked, rather than making it harder to use Microsoft's products.

Their financials would beg to differ with you on that. Their productivity software has never been more profitable. And as far as getting people hooked, they accomplished that years ago.